The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

  I still had a long way to go, but I was surprisingly content. It was one of those rare evenings when the moon had risen before the sun set: the moon hung high in the blue, a faint, crisp curve of white; the sun sat low on the horizon, amber and taciturn. For that moment, with my hand near my heart, I felt lighter than air, perfectly balanced on the world’s fulcrum with the moon and the stars wheeling at one end and the sun and clouds glowing at the other, like the silver and gold swans poised on my windowsill on East Seventh Street. As if from a great height, I saw everyone I loved most: Fleur asleep on her divan, Sarah measuring very small things at work, Janos murmuring very large numbers into his cell phone. Far away I saw my mother, mall-walking in Brewster; even farther, Caroline and Carsten, asleep in Berlin. I saw myself, typing in the lighted names of the dead onto dissolving reams of paper in the place where two rivers turned into the sea. On Central Park West, cars proceeded along, obedient as cattle. Bending down, I unlaced the grimy Doc Martens, took them off, and hurled them over the wall into the park. They went thud, thunk in the dirt. Today, I thought, I became a man. It was time to buy some real shoes. I could afford them.

  No one on the train remarked on my stockinged feet. I needed new socks, too, I noticed. The other riders probably thought I was just another homeless guy who wouldn’t stay in a shelter. I looked at my sober, bony-faced reflection in the subway window and smiled. Gabriel, thirty-eight, at Fifty-ninth and Lex. On his way home. When had that thin but perceptible line appeared between my eyes? My hair was about an inch past penumbral. After work the next day, wearing my new black lace-up shoes, I got a haircut from Sal. That was his name: Sal. Gabe, I said, holding out my hand for Sal’s firm grip, as if he was pulling me to the shore of manhood.

  In a muffin shop in Brooklyn Heights, I ordered two of their huge muffins and a double latte—I could never quite wake up these days, and I was hungry all the time—and found a seat by the window. My house on Pineapple Street was unchanged, which was both a relief and not a relief at all. What was up with my fucking lazy termites? Were they fake? Had I been gypped? I wondered what a spell cast by a curandera would cost, and how to find the best one. I could Google it later. It was humid and warm in the muffin place, like being inside a muffin. The butter was soft in the little plastic tub. Rock-and-roll from twenty years ago was playing—Duran Duran. I thought about Arizona. The curve of Tim’s small, indifferent white ass. Was the cottonwood tree still there? I buttered one of the muffins, licked the remainder of the butter off the knife. Three women with babies in strollers sat at the next table, talking excitedly about a blog they wanted to start. The shop window, glazed with condensation against the cold outside, glowed. It was all about half a size too small, which was what I liked about it. I could be here, effortlessly.

  The shop bell tinkled. Carl and Alice walked in, walked right past me. Carl was on his phone. Alice was hop-hop-hopping into the store like a rabbit. “Three!” said Carl into the phone. “That’s love, that’s definitely love. Oh, my.”

  Alice, at the counter, peered up and down, side to side, at all the types of mega-muffins. She was wearing a red coat with a hood, like Little Red Riding Hood, and white patent-leather boots. She pulled at her father’s sleeve. “Marble. Daddy. Marble.”

  He put a hand on her head, still talking, but so softly I couldn’t hear what he said. He turned around, squinted, nodded. His gaze met mine. He frowned, then he pointed. My heart sank. My God, I thought, he knows—oh Jesus, oh fuck. I felt as if termite trails were etched on my hands; I shoved them into my coat pockets.

  “You,” he said.

  “Me?”

  He waved the phone. “You still interested in the house?”

  “Yes,” I said fervently, “yes, I am, I really am, I was just going to call you, actually.”

  “Well, you better start dialing. It’s a bidding war.” He smiled broadly. “I can’t believe it. After—never mind. What’s your name again?”

  “Gabriel.”

  “Gabriel, if you want in, you’d better make an offer. This thing is moving.”

  Alice, leaning against the glass front of the counter, said, “I don’t like him.”

  “This is business,” said her father. “It doesn’t matter about liking or not liking.”

  “Yes it does,” countered Alice. “That’s our house. He can’t have it.”

  Her father looked at her tenderly.

  “Please, Carl,” I said. “I’m begging you. Two days. Forty-eight hours. Let me try to get a bid together. I love that house so much.” I assembled my most solemn expression to conceal how desperate I felt.

  Carl gave me a long look, one hand on Alice’s head. He checked his watch. “This time Friday,” he said. “And then it’s over.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Oh, thank you, thank you. You’ll be hearing from me.”

  But the problem wasn’t just the money, or Carl, or Fleur, floating on her golden bed of cash. The problem was that I had waited too long. The metamorphosis had progressed too far, though I didn’t know that yet. What I thought I knew was that my rash seemed to be spreading—the top of my foot, the back of my neck—and I was exhausted, dizzy, weak. The winds were in me.

  I had so much scheming to do and so little time to do it, but that afternoon found me lying on Janos’s sofa, with a fever, whittling away at the blood-stained figurine. I began on her left horn, working gingerly with the knife. Janos sat in a chair nearby, reading a book about the history of Prussia. A fire was burning down in the fireplace; the room smelled faintly, comfortably, of smoke. Near the fireplace, the worn Oriental carpet had an even more worn-down spot, like a shadow, where Sofia, the little dog, used to sleep on her plaid cushion all day. The huge stone square of coffee table was scattered with books, newspapers, magazines, a pad on which Janos had scrawled a few notes, a glass with melting ice in it, a plate containing my half-eaten sandwich, and a bowl of soup. I twirled one wrist in the air, then the other: they ached as though someone was sticking pins in a puppet with my name on it. I had a set of fever blisters, like the Pleiades, burning inside my mouth. I whittled my figurine, slowly piling wood shavings into a hollow in the blanket on my lap.

  “What is that going to be?” said Janos.

  “A being.” I was hot, I was cold, I was floating around in an irritable way, feeling itchy at the ankles. I was bursting with my news about the bidding war. “I bet I’m dying,” I said. “I feel weird.”

  Janos turned a page. “You have the flu.” He closed the history of Prussia. “Live with me, Gabe.” He gestured. “There’s plenty of room here for you and all your . . . beings.” He smiled.

  This was my opening. “Listen, Janos, I have to tell you.” I set the figurine and the whittling knife on top of the shavings in the soft blanket hollow. “Something so amazing has been happening.” I spilled it all out, everything about buying the house on Pineapple Street, my chance meeting with Carl and Alice in the muffin place, my destiny, my vision of the future, our matching Vespas full of cava and oysters going back and forth over the Brooklyn Bridge, what it would mean for my art. How it could be for us. I left out the blue goddess, the termites, and the blackmailing part, but I did say I was so close, so close, unbelievably close. I had almost $80,000. I needed maybe another $200,000. I felt my face grow hot as I talked, from the beauty of it all. I might have cried, just a little. I insisted. I begged. I left things out. I put things in. I asked for $280,000.

  Janos set the history of Prussia on the coffee table. He regarded me for a long moment and then said, “No, Gabriel. I am not helping you buy that house. Not in this market. You can live with me or you can fend for yourself. I have asked you so many times, and we are getting older here, have you noticed? Both of us. You’re almost forty. I’ll be sixty before we know it. We’re going to end up being two old men going to see each other in taxicabs on Saturday nights. It’s ridiculous.”

  I stared at him, furious. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how I felt. What a fucki
ng bastard! Just like Carl. Out for himself.

  As angry with him as I was, though, I had to admit that I still admired him. He was a self-made man; he had earned, more or less, everything he had. Like my mother, who now owned the Sunburst Motel, he was scrappy. His scent was espresso and the special expensive dirt in the townhouse’s atrium and laundry starch. He always wore white or light blue button-down shirts: the white-collar businessman’s uniform. For Janos, lightly starched dress shirts were a sign that you recognized the worthiness of your opponent, that you didn’t think you were any better than the average lowly trader on Wall Street hustling futures for a Christmas bonus. He would never have allowed himself to put the knife in while wearing anything else. His cuffs were immaculate. His taste bordered on the old-fashioned, the Continental, though he’d grown up in Newark.

  If I hated him so much, did that mean I loved him as well? Why didn’t I know? Maybe it was just a daddy thing. But if he was my daddy, how could he have said no? Was it because we were looking closer to the same age? Somehow forty didn’t seem as far from sixty as thirty-five had from fifty-five. My spine hurt. My eyes ached. “Maybe I should go home,” I said.

  “Maybe you should. Maybe that old bat will die tomorrow and leave you all her money. Maybe you should have saved some of what she’s already given you.”

  “Maybe she will,” I snapped. “Someone has to help me. My art!”

  He picked up his book again. “What is it, exactly, that you’re holding out for, my love?”

  I knew what he meant, but I had no answer. I hated him, but I did love him, of course. I loved his irregular face, his formidable will, the long years of his life before me. I loved his wrists, his shrewd way of eyeing the world. I had never hesitated to use the word “love” with Janos. I was searching for some other word, a word I didn’t know yet. Until I knew that word, I couldn’t live with him, whether I loved him or not. That word was somewhere in the house on Pineapple Street, written high up in a corner, but just for another forty-eight hours. Then I would be lost.

  “Goddamnit, Janos.” I took my blanket and shuffled huffily in my stockinged feet into the atrium at the center of the house. The glass atrium door made its soft thush as it closed behind me. Inside, there was real dirt and grass and several tall, thin trees. A carefully calibrated humidity permeated the three stories of air. At the top of the atrium was a round skylight, a disk of smoky, white-gray sky. There was a small stone bench inside the atrium, and hanging just above the bench was a hand-carved birch feeder for the two little, exquisite, carnival-yellow birds who had a nest among the ferns and flowers and the tall, thin trees. The birds were some sort of rare finch; Janos called them both Tweetie. If you sat on the bench, sooner or later one or both of the Tweeties would skiffle down and sit near you, or perch by your ear on the length of perfect birch, and you’d feel visited, graced, until they skiffled away again.

  I sat on the bench with a handful of birdseed, my skin feeling quilted with fever. I could hear the Tweeties high above me, gossiping, but neither of them came down. I opened my hand wider. From inside the atrium, the rest of the apartment looked like a scene from a movie, colorful but weightless. I could see Janos’s foot in its black silk sock, the light from the long window. Was it love I was holding out for? Was I waiting for a higher love to walk through the door with his shining, irresistible face? Was my true love’s name the word written high up in the house on Pineapple Street? Did he live in Brooklyn? Or was the word something else? Would I ever know what it was? Burning, despairing, I held my hand open, waiting. The gods were clearly nearby, hovering over Pineapple Street. Maybe they would whisper the word or the name to me. I waited and waited, but they didn’t come.

  But the gods, as we know, are fickle. Sometimes they take the shape of wild boars or swans or waves. Other times they inhabit lowlier creatures—termites, for instance. Which wasn’t the word Carl used when he called to tell me the bidding war was undergoing a temporary cease-fire. “We have a little problem to take care of,” Carl said. “I’ll be in touch in a few weeks, Gabe.” I smiled through my tears. Already, I knew, that house was shrouded, white, mute. Carl and Alice and Alice’s mother were out of it. With the help of the termite gods, I had done it: I had stopped the clock.

  The cake was gorgeous. Red velvet with white icing, festooned with multicolored icing flowers, an extravagant set of red, molten sugar loops—Happy 38th birthday, dear, dear Gabriel—that began at the base of the cake, ran up the side, across the top, down the other side, and off the cardboard disk. It shone brightly in the crowded Chinese restaurant, excessive as a spaceship. Sarah’s and Janos’s faces beamed at me. From Sarah, a soapstone box filled with clock parts and foreign coins—art material. From Janos, a complete set of small, exquisite wood-carving knives that cleverly rolled up in a length of canvas, with canvas handles stitched into the center. I kissed Sarah and Janos with loud smacks and cut them big fat pieces of rich red cake. Sarah laughed. “We’re going to get high on this shit.”

  Janos turned to her. “It’s so nice to see you, my dear.” He patted her hand. “It’s been too long. You look wonderful.” Which was a lie. She looked tired; her chin was pointier than ever. Subtly, he pulled his BlackBerry out of his pocket and glanced at it.

  Sarah made a face. “Mezzo mezz’. I think I’m going to break up with my boyfriend.”

  “What boyfriend?” I asked. “You don’t have a boyfriend.”

  She dropped her gaze to her slice of cake. “Sure I do. The puppetmaker.”

  “The puppetmaker? He’s your boyfriend? Janos, this cake is amazing. What are you talking about?”

  Sarah ate a delicate bite. “It doesn’t matter, because he’s not my boyfriend anymore. I’m going to tell him tonight.”

  Janos put the BlackBerry away and turned to give Sarah a keen look. “And why is that, may I ask? That you’re breaking up with this man, this toymaker.”

  “Well.” She considered, eating icing. “Okay, first, he’s not a toymaker—he’s an artist. His puppets were in the last Biennial. He’s a serious guy, pretty much. He went to Brown. That’s not the problem.” She sighed.

  “So what is the problem?” asked Janos.

  “He wants to marry me.” Her face crumpled, and I thought for a minute that she might cry, but then she regained her composure. “Like, married. This cake really is great. Where did you get it?”

  I looked closely at her. Even after all this time, and all the baths, and the curling up to sleep in her drafty house behind the house, she could duck behind an inner door—the girl door, I called it privately—and out of my sight. Always, she seemed quite young to me when she did this, perhaps five, in a white party dress, crying for a reason no one else would ever understand. Just now, for instance, all I could make out was the lacy edge of a white skirt. “Honey,” I said, “do you want to marry this guy?”

  She shrugged miserably. “I would have to move to Vermont. He got a teaching job there.”

  “What?” I nearly choked. “You can’t do that.”

  “Well.” She set her hand flat on the table. Her tone was flat, too. “That’s what a lot of real artists do, Gabriel. They teach. He’s lucky to get it.”

  Janos, sitting back, said nothing. He ate his cake slowly.

  “What do you mean, ‘real artists’?” I said.

  “He’s a real guy, Gabe,” said Sarah in a tone I didn’t like, “with a real job. He was in the Biennial.”

  “Screw the Biennial,” I said angrily. “Since when do you care about things like that? Everyone knows the Biennial is a fraud. Jesus, Sarah.” I was furious with her, but at the same time I was thinking with pride of my beneficent termites, who had intervened with time on my behalf. I cut myself another thick piece of birthday cake. “Okay, you know what? Fine. Throw away your own art. Marry the puppetmaker, move to Vermont, have ten kids, milk a cow or two, get fat and resentful, ruin the kids’ lives with your bitterness. Good plan.”

  Sarah, still eating icing, bega
n to cry. “I’m the one who’s bitter?” she said tearily.

  “Gabriel,” said Janos. “Gabriel! Apologize.”

  “No,” I said through a mouthful of red velvet cake. “We know each other too well for that. I mean, come on. She won’t even say his name. How serious could this be?”

  “Peter,” said Sarah. “Peter Priest.”

  “Peter Priest? That’s not a name. That’s absurd. Peter Priest the puppetmaker? That’s a joke.”

  Sarah looked at me coldly, tear-stained. “It is, in fact, his name, Gabe. He didn’t choose it.”

  “Gabriel,” warned Janos again. He gestured for the check. “What in God’s name is wrong with you? Are you having a stroke?”

  Sarah tapped her fork against her plate. “No, really, this is helpful.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “You being such a total fucking asshole makes me see it: I don’t want to break up with him at all. I like Peter Priest. I like him a lot. He’s incredibly gentle.”

  Burrowing into my bad behavior like a hungry termite, I snapped, “So you’re going to be Mrs. Priest? Is that where this is going?”

  Sarah stood up. She looked tall and pale and thin; her topiary hair, scattered over her shoulders, was regal. Her high forehead was flushed. Almost against my will, I knew why Peter wanted to marry her. There was something in her that burned clean.

  “I really don’t know,” Sarah said. “And screw you.” She kissed Janos, squeezed his hand, nodded at me. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said to me, “and you can apologize. At length.” She left the restaurant.

  I stared straight ahead, thinking of my termites. I counted them, began naming them.